So the whole reason we have general purpose CPUs is because in the 50's/60's they were hulking giant beasts both in size and power consumption - computing was only economical on these devices if shared.

Things shrunk and now everyone has a computer in their pocket - which in most cases is a window to the next generation of hulking giant beast - the "cloud".

So if I'm going to develop applications for the cloud instead of PCs or mainframes, it's going to need to be general purpose--because it's shared and rented by the minute/CPU cycle. Just like the mainframes of old. So some notion of general-purposeness will always be there.

Maybe hardware will support and fossilize around programming languages? One can argue that x86 is doing that and is essentially an "SOC" for C.